Okay everyone,
I know I haven’t posted anything in a couple weeks. (Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!) But College settling in…excuses excuses blah blah blah.
First order of business: bicycle helmets.
I may have mentioned this in a previous post, but other than the on-campus cops on bikes, I’m the only person on campus who wears a helmet. This includes skateboarders. My suitemate in the rooms adjoined by our common bathroom (let’s call her…Mel) says she’s seen one other person with a helmet on, but I just haven’t seen him/her. (We really need to come up with a general-neutral pronoun other than ‘it’.) Obviously you’re in college, you can do what you want, but TWO PEOPLE out of what…lets say 6,000. I’m pretty sure there are more people on campus than that but I needed a relatively big number to make my point, and some of them don’t have skateboards/bikes/scooters. Two out of six thousand is one in every three thousand people. One person out of three thousand people wears a helmet. Maybe they don’t want to look dumb. Maybe they don’t care about safety. Maybe head trauma and brain damage aren’t frightening enough to scare them into safety. Who knows. It just irked me a little. A couple people have said, “Yeah, my mom would want me wearing one, but she’s not here so…*shrug*” Glad to know us mature college students have good common sense still. And we’re the near-future of your country. Fun, huh?
Okay, I live in a co-ed dorm. On one side of the hall are guys and on the other side are girls. This is an interesting set-up. And just a few hours ago, my suitemates left and locked me out while I was down the hall hanging out with a few girls, just chilling. After discovering that I couldn’t get into my room (where my cell phone, keys, and laundry basket were. (I was doing laundry.)) I decided to wait around. Maybe they went to grab Taco Bell or something. After maybe half an hour, I found some of the guys across(ish) from our room to see if any of them had one of their cell numbers. One of them did, and he texted my roomate for me. They left their common room and bedroom doors open so maybe 5 minutes later, I wandered past and the dude who had texted my roomate for me was in boxers, wandering about in his room. So I wandered the hall and went back to my friends, figuring he’d get dressed. So I waited, then went back. Still in his room in his boxers, just kinda walking around. So I wandered the hall a bit more and then came back.
“Hey,” I said.
He turned around, looked really awkward/uncomfortable and put both his hands over his crotch. Equally uncomfortable, I moved out of the doorway so I would be unable to see him anymore. He said something I couldn’t understand.
“What?”
He said it again. Nothing.
“What?”
He said it again. Still nothing.
I stuck my head in the doorway, facing away so I couldn’t see him.
“What?”
“She didn’t text back.”
” ‘Kay.”
I went back to my friends. After a while longer, I went back to my common room to find the door locked. (I had unlocked it; it was my room that was locked.) So confused, I knocked, saying, ‘seriously?’ to no one in particular. Inside the common room, one of my suitemates’ friends repeated my question. Someone opened the door for me. Awesome. No longer locked out.
~~~~~~
On another dorm-related note, roomates/suitemates can do things that bug you, but probably aren’t a big enough deal to them to raise a fuss about it. For instance:
I like watching TV in the common room/my room (or doing whatever) with the door closed usually because it cuts out distractions and (in the TV’s case or when I’m listening to music) sound pollution. But for some reason, when people go in and out, the door stays open. I also lock the common room door when I’m sitting there alone watching TV. Even if someone is in one of the bedrooms. My suitemate’s friend, let’s call him L, (he’s not her boyfriend or anything; actually, he’s gay) finds this annoying because he is here pretty much EVERY DAY. Often more than once a day. And he knocks insistently and seems to be ticked by the fact that he can’t just walk in. Nothing against him, but some people you just don’t like. And he’s one of those people. He swears and has drawn genitals/written lewd things on our whiteboard. He’s more than a little crass and he doesn’t seem to like me much either. Something about him just rubs me the wrong way. I think its his attitude.
Also, L and my suitemates address each other with casual degratory remarks for females. (You know them. Don’t deny it. So I’m not writing them.) Which is another thing I dislike.
Remember the swearing thing I tried? Failure. Complete and total failure. And later that night, my roomate was again talking with me about how she got that I didn’t like it and stuff, but she still felt like she had a right to say what she wanted in her own room. I guess I may be asking a little much, or we somehow came to agree that I was, (on my part mostly because I don’t like conflict. I’d like everyone to peacefully coexist.) but can you see my point of view, readers? If there was something that offended you was happening daily in your house, (apartment, dorm room, trailer, cardboard box, yellow submarine, Ikea) wouldn’t you want it to stop? While I get that free speech is the first amendment and such, but in a LOT of states, saying obscenities is classified under disorderly conduct and you can actually get arrested/fined for it. Because it’s so common, it doesn’t happen much, but the point it, it’s still in the law. Ughhhhhhh!!!! I’m just really frustrated by this and there’s really nothing I can do about the situation. Mostly I don’t get into conversations with them, which isn’t too bad seeing as we have very little in common.
I really don’t mean to sound like I’m slamming my suitemates, but…(see the social networking bit for explanation.)
FACEBOOK.
We all know it. Most of us have one. And I had my blog as an accessible link on mine until very recently. Here’s the biggest reason why I took it off: people I know here can see it. People that I’m venting about. People who know the people I’m venting about. And frankly, a blog is more about sharing with the world than sharing with people you know. That, friends, is called conversation.
Just like all of you, I get frustrated. I need to vent. So I write about it. It’s like going home to your spouse/mom/significant other, or calling your best friend, and talking out a bad day/frustrating experience. Except when you talk to a friend, they generally keep it to themselves. You get rid of your frustrations and no one gets hurt. With this, it’s different. People talk and eventually your frustration gets back to whoever it is that was bugging you, and by then it’s generally blown out of proportion. And when the person aforementioned reads what you’ve written, they’re probably not in a calm and rational frame of mind. So they get offended by something that was never intended for them in the first place. So I removed the link.
On this blog, I do not name names. Unless you know me personally, you don’t know where I go to school. You don’t know who my suitemates are. I can share things without hurting anyone, because of the anonymity.
And here’s another thing: I found myself thinking about NOT blogging something because of what the people that followed my blog (that I knew in person) thought of it. I know for a fact that at least one relative, a teacher aide in one of my classes, and I think one of my professors, reads this blog. Which means there are things that I automatically wouldn’t say. I couldn’t complain about how awful the family reunion was, how the class was possibly the most useless waste of time I have ever had. (NEITHER OF THESE THINGS IS TRUE. THIS IS AN EXAMPLE. DO NOT FREAK OUT.) (In my opinion, a good bit of my freshman orientation was a significant time waster. It can be summarized pretty easily:
1. Get involved!!!!! (Shouted at you several times a day.) We have SUPER on-campus resources!!!
2. Don’t drink…but if you do, here’s a chart so you don’t get too drunk. Also, we give out free condoms.
3. Don’t get raped. (If you do, we have somewhere on campus for that too!)
4. This is college. Things are different here.
There you go.
So I’m going to have to be careful what I say sometimes, because this isn’t total anonymity. People who know me follow me. And like the roomate issue, I don’t want to say something to hurt them/get them upset.
FINALLY…
Just checking in after all the above drama/frustration…
On my novel: Just yesterday morning, I hit fifty pages. YEAH! Fifty pages of little snippets and excerpts, but since frshman year, this is the longest thing I’ve written and worked on. Seeing as novels are around 200+ pages, I’m 1/4 way done!!! WHOOOO!!!
Allrighty then those of you still tagging along for the ride…hope your days are sunny!!!
Yours,
Sunnylunatic
The (Mis) Adventures of Life as We Know It 